Egypt: Alaa and others
This is part of the GV advocay pages linked to Help these bloggers! Alaa Abd El Fatah Facts of the Case ---- Alaa Abd El Fatah, a promininent Egyptian blogger, was detained on Sunday May 7th in downtown Cairo while protesting the earlier detention of political activists rallying for a free judiciary. Ten other protesters were captured at that time, three of whom were later released. Alaa is currently being held at Torah prison for a period of fifteen days pending investigation. On 20 May 2006, the State Security Prosecution has extented his detainment for 15 more day. Accodring to the Emergency Law which is being applied to Alaa and other detainees, State Security Prosecution must release the detainees or present them to the court after 45 days. He has been charged with illegal assembly (in violation of the state of emergency law), blocking traffic, insulting President Mubarak, and verbal abuse of police officers at the time of his arrest. Free Alaa Campaign Tactics ---- # e-mail/online collaboration - this is pretty basic (hardly Web 2.0) but it nevertheless allowed three people in different countries (Morocco, Bahrain, Lebanon) to collaborate and launch a blog. Total time from proposition of idea to completion of Free Alaa website - 24 hours. Online collaboration allowed a global division of labor. A man in Holland made a Flash animation. A group in Cambridge made a petition page. A man in Florida started a Wikipedia entry. # Flash Animation: Blogger Sami Ben Gharbia created a Flash animation dramatizing Alaa's imprisonment. # Online Petition: The people a Hamsa Web, a Cambridge-based NGO that encourages Americans to push for civil liberties in the Middle East, created an online petition that automatically sends a letter of protest to figures such as the American Ambassador to Egypt and the Egyptian Prime Minister. # Vlogging - Andy Carvin created a {http://www.andycarvin.com/video/freealaa2.mov video] about Alaa's detention # Badges - Mustapha created Alaa badges for bloggers to but on their blogs. This was the first action of the Free Alaa campaign. # Wikipedia Entry - Peter Shea created a Wikipedia entry about Alaa and then others edited it. # Blogger (the site) - By using a templated webpage service we were able to create a professional-looking website in a few hours # bloggers (the people) - Bloggers are a great alternative method of spreading news internationally. News spreads to the general public through blog readers. In addtion, blogger culture has a built-in method of news dissemination. Bloggers read each other. It is not necessary to send an e-mail to every blogger asking him or her to post about a human rights case. It is only necessary that a few high-traffic blogs write about it. Then the message will be disseminated both to their readers and to other bloggers. # Google bombing - Although this technique is becoming discredited, it is important to note that Google-bombing for Alaa (G-B4A) was one of the first web actions taken on behalf od Alaa's release and may have helped to bring more buzz to his detention. # Technorati/tagging - By asking bloggers to tag their Google bombs googlebombingforalaa Technorati acts as an ad-hoc aggregator for G-B4A posts. By agreeing on a single tag for a particular case, Technorati acts as an ad-hoc aggregator for those posts when the tag is searched in their database. # wiki - a wiki was created to catalogue all the blog posts that include G-B4A's. Because it is a wiki, anyone can edit the page and add the URLs of new posts. # Digg.com - A few articles about Alaa's case were submitted to Digg.com, a site that move news up in its rankings according to popularity. For More Information ---- # http://www.manalaa.net/ (Alaa's own blog, currently being maintained by his wife Manal) # http://freealaa.blogspot.com/ (blog about Alaa's detention started by an international group of bloggers) # http://www.sandmonkey.org/ (Egyptian blogger following Alaa's detention) Ahmed Yasser El Droubi Facts of the Case ---- Free Alaa Campaign Tactics ---- For More Information ---- Mohammad Sharqawi Protest-leader and keeper of SpeakerFreely.net. Sharqawi was detained in front of the Judges Club on 24 April 2006 for participating in a sit-in supporting independent judiciary in Egypt. He was accused by State Security Prosecution of "Protesting, damaging public property, and preventing public officials from carrying out their jobs (clearning the sit-in)". After spending almost a month in Tora Prison, and managing to blog from there, Sharqawi was released by a similar decree on 21 May 2006. Malek Mostafa Blogger, member of alWasat Party. On 26 April 2006, Malek was detained from a down-town Cairo sit-in supporting independent judiciary, and has ben kept by State Security in Tora Prison South of Cairo. Mohammad Adel Mohammad Adel is a Muslim Brotherhood youth, and is active with Youth for Change, and blogs in Blog of a Dead Man. He is under 18 years of age, and therefore still a minor according to Egyptian law. Karim asShaer Karim, a university student, member of the banned Islamist Labour Party, and keeper of Free Egypt blog, was detained on 7 May 2006 in front of a downtown Cairo court for protesteting the detention ofparticipants in a sit-in to support independent judiciary in Egypt. Karim was detained 15 days by the order of the uncontitutional State Security Proecution. He was kept in Tora Prison, and was released on 20 May 2006. Asmaa Ali Detained on 7 May 2006 for protesting the detention of participants in a sit-in supporting independent judiciary. Asmaa keeps a blog titled Details, and a socialist. She is one of the four women in detention at Qanatir Prison North of Cairo.